The way I would personally explain it is that Unions are great for rallying workers behind a party but not for seizing political power themselves. Anarchist Spain was one of the few countries that went the syndicalist route and ended up being isolated from the masses. A vanguard party that Unions rally behind allows for it to conquer political power. Anarchist Spain didn’t have a party and just an amalgam of unions; strong, but without the necessary mass support. What made the Soviet model so unique is it put workers and peasants in a position to self govern while also represented in parliament by the RSDP. The CNT-FAI did not conquer political power and in effect distanced itself.
On top of that, not all unions would be radical and I’m talking about back then. Today there are very few radical unions and they wouldn’t come close to conquering political power in any way.
Anarcho-syndicalism falls to all the same issues that vanilla anarcho-communism does.
How can one expect to fight off reactionary influence both from within and without if one doesn’t have a decisive central power to help defend the working class and solidify the revolution’s hold?
Anarchism has existed nearly as long as concepts of socialism and yet there have been numerous successful ML revolutions and not a single successful anarchist one.
Changing the organizational specifications won’t change these things, syndicalism is no more potent or effective than average anarchism.
I mean in the USA most syndicalism is based on the following “analysis”:
- Many elected politicians are opportunists
- Elections won’t pave the way for socialism (ML’s agree but not why they endorse them provisionally)
- Parties are often corrupted
Of course, if you then move on to listen to, say, the IWW, they’ll say that the entire union movement except for them basically are also corrupted.
And if you listen to Wobblies talking shop when their guard is down they’ll admit the IWW is corrupt, too, just in its own weird ways.
Then you realize that all these organizational forms are embedded within capitalism and all are vulnerable to cooptation or recuperation and that there are no guarantees of success because this is real life. Then you realize that anarcho syndicalism amounts to fetishizing unions as some kind of bastion of revolutionary purity, or at least some unions.
To respond to this most anarcho syndicalists point to their support for industrial unionism versus trade unionism. I just point to the fact that in most capitalist countries industrial unionism basically doesn’t exist. The IWW is the only American union I know of that practices industrial unionism and critiques trade unionism. And the IWW is a negligible fraction of the US labor movement (5875 in 2019 out of 14.6 million unionized workers in the US, this is less than a hundredth of a percent).
Empirically it seems invalid to suggest that industrial unionism presents a more vital and viable model of labor organizing than trade unionism because it hasn’t actually been more effective or viable since the Red Scare and definitely hasn’t ever been demonstrated to be viable in the Taft Hartley regulatory environment. Since the IWW’s organizing activity tends to stay within the bounds of established labor law, this does in fact matter.